Reflections on family portrait with self-portrait is a response to a residency spent within a large country house, richly adorned with portraits of the family who used to own it, the Stirling-Maxwell's of Pollok, along side a notable collection of portraits of the Spanish Habsburg family. It is a work that plays with ideas of self representation, vanity and time travel.
The lengths I go to to conceal my vanity:
I habitually check no one is watching before regarding myself in a mirror.
I continually resist the urge to commission a professional artist to paint my portrait.
I temper my natural generosity and humility with an affectation of mean, showy behaviour.
I counted fifteen mirrors in this house, but could never count the number of portraits.
Each painted portrait captures its sitter in a premeditated moment of their performative self.
Each mirror contains the pattern of reflected light for every face that ever looked into it.
In 1978 the physicist John Wheeler proposed ‘Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment’. This thought experiment employs the principle of the wave-particle duality of light to propose that light can ‘choose’ to be a wave or a particle depending on how it is subsequently measured. In short, this suggests that actions of the present can influence the past. Wheeler used the term “participatory universe” to describe a universe where all our minds are in some way deeply connected with the very fabric of space and time. For me, this opens up the imaginative potential for these mirrors as windows into time travel.
Click this link to watch an online version of this work.
Reflections on family portrait with self-portrait, 2018
Performance to video made for the exhibition, Cabinet Interventions at Pollok House, Glasgow, Scotland.
This exhibition was the concluding event to series of artists' residencies at the National Trust for Scotland property, Pollok House over the Summer and Autumn of 2017.
For more information about this project, please see the following website: https://cabinetinterventions.org
During the research phase of this work I conducted a promenade performance workshop based on the material I had discovered and which was feeding its development. I later adapted this for an artist's talk at the University of Ulster. In 2021 I finally got round to reinterpreting this material as a video. This is titled:
Reflections on: 'Reflections on Family Portrait with Self-Portrait (A meandering meditation on vanity, space-time and representation) With Alan Currall, 2021
This second video can be considered a companion piece to the original.